WotC WotC needs an Elon Musk

[Lanefan]

I will offer, if someone really needs help, to write a brief Plane of Salt adventure for 5.5E, but only if it's sincerely going to be run from start to finish with a play report afterward. The term "Salt Princess" keeps popping up in my head and it will be quite tragic.

The Plane of Salt is all that remains of a side-plane of the Elemental Plane of Water; when the Great Evaporation began here this side-plane was quickly hived off from the Water plane before the Evaporation could spread everywhere. The plane of Water was saved but here, all that's left is salt.

The Salt Princess was a Mermaid, whose spirit somehow survived the Evaporation and who now has a body comprised of salt. There may well be others - many others - like her. Your task as adventurers is to find a way to return these Creatures of Salt to water, such that they may resume their previous forms.

Howzat?

 

[Lanefan]

I just want Planescape to be its own setting and the other settings get to do something else.

Except that would utterly defeat the primary purpose of Planescape, which is to tie all the other settings together.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Except that would utterly defeat the primary purpose of Planescape, which is to tie all the other settings together.

Except Spelljammer is the one that actually does that and does that without alignment or Sigil.

 

[humble minion]

Except that would utterly defeat the primary purpose of Planescape, which is to tie all the other settings together.

Maybe. but what that tended to look like in real life was Planecape NPCs being condescending about the petty concerns of the obscure Prime world you called home, and whatever great evil is arising there. Stop being so provincial, berk.

I find settings like Planescape and Spelljammer work better as standalones than meta-settings with other written settings embedded within them, because they have a very specific effect on worlds that they 'contain'. TSR understood this to some degree with the Dark Sun line, they made it really hard to access from SJ and PS because if Athas has contact with the outside universe and can suddenly import water and iron etc, and discover genuine gods among the planes, etc etc, then it fundamentally alters the setting and trivialises the hardships that Dark Sun was written around.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Except that would utterly defeat the primary purpose of Planescape, which is to tie all the other settings together.

I thought that the primary purpose of Planescape was to have philosophers with clubs punching each other in a planar city.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Maybe. but what that tended to look like in real life was Planecape NPCs being condescending about the petty concerns of the obscure Prime world you called home, and whatever great evil is arising there. Stop being so provincial, berk.

And then the designers have the nerve to not let you burn the place down.

 

[Incenjucar]

Planescape is a lot of things. It's also a way to see epic level stuff without having to be level 16+ first. It's also a place where you can have an adventure involving an affair between a servant of Loki and a servant of Horus.

 

[humble minion]

I thought that the primary purpose of Planescape was to have philosophers with clubs punching each other in a planar city.

That was the point of Sigil. But Planescape always had this tension between 'this a wildly expansive setting that covers every bizarre corner of the multiverse and every other setting we've ever written!' and 'here's a city at the centre of everything where everything important happens so you end up staying here most of the time anyway'.

 

[Chaosmancer]

The great wheel makes sense to me as natural for D&D for two big aspects.

1 Alignment is a fundamental cosmic force of D&D, so having this show up as a fundamental aspect of the outer planes can work for me.

No comment

2 Allowing for multiple pantheons from Deities & Demigods to coexist in the same world you have multiple planes to accommodate their individual conflicting cosmologies in the big overarching cosmology, so there are planes for both Olympus and Asgard and Tarterous and Hell. This accomodates things like a Xena type campaign with Hercules and Gilgamesh cross-overs, or a Marvel comics type sprawling cosmology where lots of different stuff from different sources and inspirations is incorporated over time where Thor and Hercules and Doctor Strange can team up to fight Nightmare or Set from Conan.

This is why the Astral Domains are set up the way they are, in the 4e system. Thinking of each pantheon's home as a world in the the space means that you don't have the issues of the gods all living in the same home. Asgard can work as only the home of the Norse Pantheon, floating in the Astral Sea, without it having to be a fundamental plane of infinite reality.

It also prevents the weirdness of layers of gods. Asgard is a fundamental plane and the home of the Norse gods, but the Egyptian Gods don't have their own fundamental plane, they live in someone else's home.

 

[Veltharis ap Rylix]

It also prevents the weirdness of layers of gods. Asgard is a fundamental plane and the home of the Norse gods, but the Egyptian Gods don't have their own fundamental plane, they live in someone else's home.

Asgard is a realm within the broader plane of Ysgard (as are Alfheim, Vanaheim, and Jotunheim, for that matter). Just because the Norse gods are a major presence on the plane, that doesn't mean it belongs to them alone.

Heliopolis, the major realm associated with many of the Egyptian gods, is in Arcadia.

Also, there's no real reason divine realms within a broader Outer Plane can't be accessed directly from the Astral anyway. Passing through a color pool to Ysgard is going to drop you at a specific place within the plane anyway, so why can't that place be within Asgard?

There's no reason the Spelljammer/4e model of Divine Realms accessed directly from the Astral can't function just fine alongside Planescape's Divine Realms accessed through the various Outer Planes.